
They were not the letters of a house servant. They bore Dugay’s hand, declarations where he spoke to a mistress…

He saw her kneeling before the bakery step like a human outline cut out of the rubble and stopped walking….

The generals’ hands hovered. The meal was almost too simple in its offence. “This is a mockery,” whispered one, younger…

The drop surprised them all with a kind of grace. Parachutes blossomed from the ragged belly of the plane and…

The saloon smelled of whiskey, sweat, and stale cigar smoke. Hayes lay slumped against the back wall of his private…

Part I — Arrival and Calculation ……. One late night, when the household was set in sleep and the moon…

Tom remembered the night the shelter burned. He remembered the smell of smoke and his mother’s hands and then the…

The hospice was a small, one-story block building at the end of a quiet residential road. A rose garden leaned…

So she stayed by the fountain because the small apartment she rented off a narrow street felt too empty tonight….

It did not matter. The battalion lost men. The snipers took them in the mornings, when men bent to fill…

Something like a hush fell over the chaos. His screams faltered, then slowed. His hands loosened. He took one step,…

Ethan went home with the note burning in his pocket. Lily was asleep when he checked on her, curled around…

They looked at her like she had the audacity of a moth buzzing a chandelier. Then Giovani lifted his gaze,…

Halfway up, Leisel’s foot slipped. She grabbed at the clay and went down, her knees disappearing into brown. She tried…

The sound of a fork against a plate was the only thing that broke the awkward silence of that dinner….

At a family gathering, my wife’s sister slapped me in front of my kids. She yelled, “You’re not even a…

“Amelia, I have something special planned for you,” Richard said, his voice barely audible over the roar of the propellers….

The Sunday dinner at the Miller family estate was a weekly ritual of quiet, suffocating dread. The air in the…

I walked into Everly & Co. Bridal in Charleston carrying my sister’s oversized designer tote like a pack mule. The…

When Sergeant Alvaro Cifuentes stepped off the military bus in the small town of Borja , Zaragoza, after nearly ten months deployed on an…